On Tuesday night, Philadelphia won big with three Michelin stars, 10 Bib Gourmands, and 21 Recommended winners.
One of the world’s most prestigious restaurant awards, Michelin deploys anonymous inspectors to assess restaurants and designate the honorees. Not too much is known about these inspectors — decision-making is made by a globally diverse group, not an individual, and most have several years’ experience in the restaurant or hospitality industry, according to Gwendal Poullennec, international director of the Michelin Guide. They use changing names and phone numbers and visit a restaurant multiple times to evaluate its full merit.
While the 34 Michelin-recognized restaurants were presumably all-new to the guide’s inspectors, The Inquirer has written about all of them before — in a few cases, not entirely favorably. Here’s how the food desk has covered Philly’s Michelin-starred and Bibbed restaurants in the past. (For a breakdown of Michelin Guide hierarchy, read more here.)
Philly’s Michelin-starred restaurants
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Her Place Supper Club: Amanda Shulman’s dinner party-as-a-restaurant was born out out of her cooking on Penn’s campus, transitioned to a residency in a former Slice pizza shop in Rittenhouse, and has bloomed into a full-on restaurant — now Michelin-starred — that still manages to be endearingly idiosyncratic. When Inquirer critic Craig LaBan first reviewed Her Place, the cooking was so good, “I needed to do yet another double-take to remind myself that Shulman was producing this feast for two dozen diners nearly single-handedly,” he wrote in 2021. These days, the kitchen is led by chef de cuisine Ana Caballero and sous-chef Santina Renzi, whose skill and energy landed Her Place in LaBan’s Top 10 last year and this year’s edition of The 76.
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Friday Saturday Sunday: Another 76 pick, Chad and Hanna Williams’ “townhouse oasis off Rittenhouse Square, already the most exciting fine dining experience in Philly, has only gotten better,” LaBan wrote after its Outstanding Restaurant James Beard win in 2023. When the couple first opened the restaurant in 2016 — using the same name as the building’s 42-year predecessor — they created some ripples. “At last … the most normal thing on the menu!” LaBan overheard during one of his earliest review dinners there. His reaction was very different: The restaurant has routinely appeared in his annual Top 10 lists in the years since.
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Provenance: While Michelin awarded chef Nicholas Bazik and his finely tuned team a coveted star, LaBan found flaw in Philly’s recent most ambitious French fine-dining project, which he reviewed last October: “When you’re paying $225 to sit down for a 2½-hour dinner (figure between $700 or $800 for two all-in with tip and tax, depending on what you drink), there isn’t much room for error. And there are still too many menu missteps at Provenance, where only about half of the 47 compositions I tasted over two meals were a complete success.” (Ed. note: I sense a followup review in the future…)
Green star
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Pietramala: Chef Ian Graye also scored a Green star for Pietramala, his sustainability-minded vegan restaurant. In his 2023 review — which the NoLibs restaurant shared with Primary Plant Based (now closed) and Miss Rachel’s Pantry — LaBan found lots of bright spots and a disappointment or two, concluding of Graye’s cooking: “I’d rather someone swung big than timidly struck out.“ The swings are connecting even more these days: Pietramala was in LaBan’s Top 10 last year.
Bib Gourmand
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Angelo’s: A Bib may not have surprised the masses who wait in line to try one of Danny DiGiampietro’s famed cheesesteaks (sometimes to Bella Vista’s chagrin), but Inquirer cheesesteak columnist Tommy Rowan may have raised an eyebrow. On a May visit to Angelo’s, his sandwich “buckled under the weight of overstuffed meat, which was once again on the drier side.”
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Dalessandro’s: Dalessandro’s was voted Philly’s best cheesesteak in The Inquirer’s 2023 bracket, but LaBan isn’t convinced of its Bib. He criticized the guide’s choice of the Roxborough shop, citing a recent “memorably bad cheesesteak … that looked like the beef had been fed to a wood chipper before it was slapped on my bun.”
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Del Rossi’s: LaBan has never formally weighed in on Del Rossi’s, but he was not surprised by the shop’s Bib designation, based on his reaction to the guide’s announcements. Named among The Inquirer’s picks for best cheesesteak spots in Philly, Del Rossi’s might have been a forgettable takeout shop in NoLibs, but has been transformed into a Michelin honoree thanks to the dedication and work of Nish Patel, who took over the shop in 2020 as “a Saladworks franchisee, with no experience in sandwiches or pizzas.”
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Dizengoff: Mike Solomonov and Steve Cook bowled LaBan over a decade ago with its specialty, what the critic characterized as “‘hummina hummina hummina’ hummus.” Solomonov and Cook expanded Dizengoff in 2024 into a 95-seater restaurant with a distinct dinner menu, then consolidated earlier this year to one all-day menu (that has yet to be reviewed by The Inquirer).
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El Chingón: When this South Philly BYOB opened in 2023, it marked “the first time in his three-decade career that [chef Carlos] Aparicio has cooked Mexican food professionally,” LaBan wrote in his glowing, sandwich-centered review. Aparicio hasn’t looked back since, earning a place in LaBan’s Top 10 that year (not to mention the brand-new Bib).
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Pizzeria Beddia: What was once an esoteric, exclusive cult hit slinging 40 pies a night max was made available to the masses when Joe Beddia’s Lee Street restaurant opened in 2019. LaBan didn’t mind the lack of eccentricities: “Pizzeria Beddia 2.0 … is so many lovely things the tiny original takeout corner was not. It accepts credit cards! There’s a bathroom! It is an actual restaurant!”
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Sally: Not much has been written in our pages about the pies at this Fitler Square pizza shop since it opened in 2021. LaBan saw promise in it back then — citing its “thoughtfully composed toppings” and “supple and heat-blistered Neapolitan doughs” — but the region’s bustling pizza scene has kept him understandably occupied in the years since. According to reporter Michael Klein, the restaurant has a new chef as of this fall.
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Fiorella: Opened weeks before COVID-19 shut down Philadelphia’s restaurants, Marc Vetri’s pasta bar crammed into in an old-school Bella Vista sausage shop didn’t quite get its time in the sun until the following October. That’s when LaBan included it in his Top 10 Best Restaurants of 2021, pronouncing the rigatoni tossed in a ragu studded with fennel sausage (made according to the Fiorella family recipe) the bar’s most magnetic pasta.
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Royal Sushi & Izakaya: Perhaps the most unexpected (but not entirely surprising) reveal in the Michelin ceremony was the Bib Gourmand designation awarded to chef Jesse Ito’s Queen Village restaurant. It clearly only applies to the izakaya side (or the $355-a-head omakase counter would be the world’s most expensive Bib Gourmand honoree). LaBan awarded the overall restaurant three bells (R.I.P.) when he first reviewed it in 2017 (though notably, it was not his pick for restaurant of the year or best dish of the year). Even then, the izakaya side offered “some of the best Japanese comfort food around,” LaBan wrote, adding “Jesse’s sushi, though, is the best reason to come.”
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Famous 4th Street Deli: Among LaBan’s 2019 picks for best Jewish delis, Famous 4th changed hands in 2024, passing from Russ Cowan, Philly’s Jewish deli kingmaker, to New England restaurateur Al Gamble. There’s been some health department-involved drama in the time since. Can it keep up the excellence it had under Cowan’s steady hand (and the Auspitz family before that)? “I have concerns‚” LaBan wrote last year. Michelin’s inspectors apparently don’t.
